Fragments of Indian Philosophy

The project is based on the results of an earlier project involved in the collecting and analyzing of fragments of early Nyaya texts. It will build on a relational database that has been developed for storing fragmentary text material. Orthodox Indian philosophical traditions are mainly represented by commentaries on the schools` founding texts. These are ascribed to certain sages and were - according to the current stage of research - finalized in their classical form by anonymous redactors in the first half of the first millennium. However, in addition to the transmitted commentaries, it is most likely that there was within the various philosophical traditions a considerable corpus of other works written during the first millennium that has not survived. Basic ideas often seem to be related to authors whose works are lost. This assumption is substantiated by the fact that such ideas are often referred to in the works of authors of opposing schools and systems. The main aim of the proposed project is to make an attempt at comprehensively collecting and analyzing the quotations and paraphrases from and allusions to the texts of the Sankhya, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, and Lokayata traditions with special reference to early Epistemology, Logic and Dialectics.. Another major goal of the project will be the systematic search for fragments of texts in the philosophical Sanskrit works of the Jainas, specifically in the works of the Digambara Jainas. In addition, the project will investigate the Indian convention of quoting and referring to earlier works or views as an element of composition in other branches of scientific literature. The project is dedicated to collecting pieces of the lost heritage of South Asian philosophy, aiming, more specifically, at differentiating between the various types of attestations of lost works. In some cases, a thought from a lost work is merely alluded to; in other cases, the diction of a lost work is preserved as a quote or is paraphrased. Based on this differentiation, the term "fragment" is also used here in a narrower sense, namely, as an antonym to "allusion". Fragment is understood as a text passage that not only reflects a thought or an idea from a lost work, but also most likely retains the distinct wording of a particular theory, this having been incorporated verbatim into the work preserving it.

The main aim of the project was to collect and analyze (1) quotations and paraphrases/reports from and (2) allusions to lost texts from various Indian philosophical traditions, as well as to collect (3) prosopographical information related to their authors. The more specific goal of the project was to undertake a systematic search for text fragments in Sanskrit philosophical works of the Sankhya, Vaisheshika, Nyaya, Mimamsa, and Lokayata traditions. By critically investigating fragments of texts from these various intellectual traditions, it is possible to clarify questions regarding relations and interactions between them, both within and outside the respective schools. Until now examinations in the international scholarly community of such questions have been inadequate. It is also likely that the collected fragmentary material of these lost works will shed light on open questions concerning chronology, another desideratum for many works of these traditions. One of the outcomes of this systematic analysis of cited passages has been the establishment of an innovative methodology for classifying quotations, paraphrases, and reports.At present the entire collection of fragments, paraphrases, allusions, and prosopographical information in the database consists of 526 entries dealing with fragments, information or reports, 83 author names, 16 school names, 40 work titles, 311 translations of fragments, 234 variant readings in the editions (colour-coded for ease of comparison), 254 keywords, 1,260 keyword-fragment relations, 541 author-fragment relations, and 16,818 primary and secondary source bibliographical entries. The database has been designed and developed to store, process and publish the fragments after they have been collected and analyzed. The publication platform Browse database displays the name of the author, the fragments text and its source (ca. 50% of the collected fragment material, limited here due to still necessary proofreading, data completion, etc.). Towards the end of the project period, an expanded demo version was developed for displaying also variants, translations, fragment context, keywords, and remarks, including secondary literature. This platform currently contains 84 entries (i.e. about 15% of the collected material; cf. http://nyaya.oeaw.ac.at/cgi-bin/wr/dlistaut.pl). To facilitate the work of the projects international collaborators, a Joint Symposium between Austria and Japan was organized by the project director and Prof. Dr. Hiroshi Marui (Tokyo University). The symposium, titled Transmission and Tradition: The Meaning and Role of Fragments in Indian Philosophy, was held 2024 August 2012 at Shinshu University, Matsumoto, Nagano. Sixty international scholars attended and twenty-six papers were read.